Page 120 of Deep Cover

11

Annie

Galeao International Airport in Rio de Janeiro reduced its call letters to GIG. Something about that entertained me.

When we stepped into the tropical air, it was summer. I'd never traveled internationally before, which meant I'd had to get a passport. That meant I'd have had to have my birth certificate and probably my social security card and all sorts of identification that I clearly didn't go undercover with.

I didn't go into treatment for addiction with mad billionaires carrying my most basic forms of ID either.

Somehow, even when I was working on the heavy bag and sitting in Cole's enforced meditation, enduring a massage I didn't want and doing the yoga I definitely didn't want to do, I never imagined myself at a post office or federal building or anywhere else presenting my ID and walking away with a freshly minted passport. Or having one mailed. I didn't even know how that process worked and by the time we were on his private jet flying to GIG, I still didn't know.

Billionaires have a way around the system. That wasn't something I wanted to look too closely at.

Though I'd never gone out of the country and didn't have any great plans to do so when I got back to that increasingly mythological seeming "real life" of mine, getting a real passport now seemed like it might be problematic. There had to be some record of what he'd procured for me, didn't there?

I forgot about it when I stepped into the airport. It was huge, modern, and actually called something else, I discovered, with the original name being the GIG name. Gleaming modern surfaces reflected light. We landed around noon local time and the city gleamed in sunlight. We stepped out of the airport into summer.

From Southern Nevada it wasn't that big a jolt. The days there were in the mid-fifties. The days in Rio were in the mid-eighties.

We'd traveled with hired guards I'd walked Cole through screening. It was a weird hybrid experience for me because I was used to the muscle the Brotherhood would sometimes bring onboard and the screening that PD might do if a local business was hiring, maybe for a concert. PD did background checks. Brotherhood did informal tests to find out who they were working with and also did background checks. At least, it did under Jesse, who ran his drug trade like a business. A well run business, too.

From those two things I knew about, I cobbled together with Cole's head of security a way to find the right guards to take with us. It was as much fun as a session in Cole's punishment room, because the guards had anticipated going with him and now only the head of security was going and he'd just be in Rio. Most of the people traveling with Cole would be the muscle we hired.

So yeah, I was making friends in the compound right and left.

All of that fell away when I stepped out into the warm tropical air and smelled a thousand different scents that weren't home and weren’t Vegas, either. The air was soft, much higher humidity than the Nevada desert, and warm, unlike Seattle's sea air. I breathed in deep and thought just by the sense of smell alone, I'd have known I was somewhere else.

"What do you think so far?" Cole was grinning, that triangular, mischievous grin seeming here like the excited smile of a kid. He wanted to impress me with this, as though everything he did didn't impress me already.

With a start, I realized there was no way he could know that. In fact, I hadn't known it myself. But his philanthropy, his caring, his focus on rainforest-based drugs that were affordable and could help people - All of that impressed me. His pharmaceuticals all underwent the same rigorous FDA approval processes and even Cole couldn't speed that along, which was too bad, if my own results were anything to go by. The opiate addiction cure was working. Every day I felt stronger.

Where my own treatment was probably lacking and where a lot of other people would find problems, was in not having some kind of talk therapy to accompany it. There were reasons I had fallen into addiction and they weren't just that a bunch of bad shit happened all at the same time and then the drug turned up in the pocket of my jeans. That I was as low as I'd ever felt and bingo! Addiction.

There were reasons I'd used that poison in the first place. Doubtless some of those reasons were still in play since when things got difficult with Cole I still wanted it. The difference was it was a yearning for escape, not a painful physical imperative I couldn't answer.

But I'd turned to it because my support system wasn't there. I wasn't anything resembling "close" with my sisters, my nieces and nephews were a source of stress I avoided. Children and their screaming didn't interest me. I wasn't motherhood material. I loved my parents but I'd never have gone to my father with my fentanyl problem even if he'd been healthy. The fact that he'd been so sick had driven me to it.

I didn't buy the "perfect storm" scenario, though. It wasn't just that everything had gone wrong. I wouldn't have fallen if there hadn't been things in my past and things in my present that weren't working. Things that added one too many stressors and one too few supports.

That was what I wasn't working on. I couldn't see doing it with Cole. I couldn't see him bringing in a therapist to work with me. Somehow the idea of a legitimate psychotherapist who was good enough to help me work through my issues coming to work with a captive slave in a remote desert compound stretched my imagination until it broke.

"You're thinking very serious thoughts," Cole said in my ear as the limo purred to the far end of the airport.

My eyes had to be wide as saucers. We were about to tour Rio. His comment brought me back to myself. This wasn't a time or place to be thinking about the bad things that got me here.

I could enjoy where I was.

"Thank you for this chance, sir," I said.

Cole looked surprised, then he winked. "What do you want to see first?"

"Um, everything? Seriously, what I know is about the buildings where your meetings are, and the people you're meeting with, to the extent I could find them. The only thing I know about the local food is there's too much fish."

It was weird to make Cole laugh. He was rarely serious, often concerned with small strange cruelties or his own pleasure, but outright displays of humor were rare.

But that made him laugh.

Billionaires have a certain rock star status but the nice thing is they're not really rock stars. Place a lousy tourist hat on Cole's head and some baggy tourist shorts on him and once I managed to control my urge to laugh to the point where he wouldn't kill me for it, we were good to go. Yes, he had an entourage and yes, the security dudes were obviously just that, but it could be toned down so only those people who know such things – that's private security, that's a bulletproof car – would notice.

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